The mental and the physical…

Things are bloody tough right now. I never thought I would be in the position that food is the thing that is getting in the way of me doing trauma therapy. My eating disorder has always been quietly in the background. It has been there for years helping me cope with things. Every so often it will raise its head and take the front seat. When that happens I need intervention medically and through mental health services to help things to become more manageable. I have never seen my eating disorder as a huge issue as for the most part my blood tests, ECG’s and other test all come back normal and the biggest thing that makes me think that I don’t need to be concerned is that I’m overweight (I know eating disorders come in any shape and size, this is just my mental hang up. You can still be ill with an eating disorder when overweight). Ever since I started reducing self harm my eating disorder has become more prominent. My blood tests are no longer coming back ok and my weight is dropping. It’s hard to decipher things because I have also been physically unwell. I am having investigations to see if I have inflammatory bowel disease which can cause weight loss, loss of appetite, altered blood test results amongst other things. However I am very aware that the eating disorder voice is very loud at the moment. It is getting its grubby little hands in and messing up the lines between physical health and mental health. I haven’t been able to eat properly for several months because of the pain I’m in and my intake is somewhat limited due to what causes digestive flare ups. I also have diabetes so my blood sugars have been somewhat shaky over the past few weeks. My body is just struggling and I am finding it so hard to look after it and give it what it needs especially when there is a lot of pain involved when I eat. My therapist has said that if I continue this way trauma therapy isn’t going to be able to go ahead as you need to be fully aware of your surroundings and able to do the processing that is involved in trauma work. I’m so scared. This feels like so much to get my head around and what I am doing isn’t enough so I need to do more but honestly doing more feels so out of reach. As always I am trying to focus on the here and now and just take baby steps forwards. I’m definitely not just standing by letting myself get more unwell but this is clearly going to take a lot of work.